Server clusters are commonly used to provide failover and high availability of information to clients. Clusters typically have a cluster service that performs functions for managing cluster failover and load balancing. The cluster service typically provides fast failure detection to provide maximal service availability. From the client perspective, however, most failure detection is performed via network timeouts. If a client initiates a request to a cluster, such as a file access request or database access request, using transmission control protocol (TCP) the failure is not detected until a timeout is reached. The client waits for an acknowledgement from the server for a predefined period of time, or if the client has issued an operation and received an acknowledgement, it waits for a response from the server for a predefined period of time. The time required to detect a server failure can therefore vary from relatively fast to 30 seconds or longer. For the client to detect the failure more quickly, it has to be active (i.e., sending requests frequently) to determine that the server has failed. One way to ensure quick detection is for the client to constantly send keep-alive packets to help prevent the case of an idle client not receiving a network disconnect if the server fails. However, keep-alive packets consume network bandwidth.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that embodiments have been made. Also, although relatively specific problems have been discussed, it should be understood that the embodiments should not be limited to solving the specific problems identified in the background.